With the way we ended Tier 12 we were in high spirits and after a couple of PTR raids we already had a grasp of all the bosses on normal and we had a rough idea of the mechanics going into the tier. This excitement was reflected on patch day where we noticed we had 10 online at 4pm and started raiding early. Considering we had 13 raiders at this point though we decided to do a couple of bosses and then wait till normal raid time. We waited for a few hours then came back and swept through everything.

With normal modes out of the way we were eagerly awaiting the opening of heroic modes and we weren’t disappointed. After doing a Baradin Hold and then Heroic Morchok (which were about the same difficulty), we were left with a choice of which heroic boss to go next. After using the only method we know of sorting out decisions (the coin came up heads) we decided we would go for Zon'ozz. It was at this point we realized it was quite a difficult encounter, but we persisted and were rewarded with World 150th Kill, missing out on realm first by 40 minutes.

The next raid we started and after Zon'ozz we didn’t find Yor'sahj that much of a challenge and we felt vindicated that we had decided to go Zon'ozz first. With 3 down we moved onto Hagara and after some experiment pulls we decided how to spend the last raid of the reset since we knew Ultraxion was the kind of boss we never have a problem with. In the previous tier Baleroc had taken us 8 tries in total and it was a similar story with Ultraxion leading us to taking a realm first and a World 200th.

We came back the next reset and having thought about Hagara and come up with ways of managing the phases things came together and we made short work of it. With several of our key members going on holiday for Christmas we decided we would take a winter break at this point and see what we could do in January. We squeezed in about 15 tries or so on Warmaster before Christmas and decided to take the break thinking about it to come back later. With some of us still around between Christmas and New Year we formed up a raid and used the opportunity to do some normal modes and the achievements associated with them.

This was the tier we had finally started achieve what we had been striving towards this expansion. Our wowprogress ranking was blue and within the top 200 and we were #1 on the realm, however real life commitments and a general level of disappointment with Dragon Soul were rife amongst our members. Together with the release of SW:TOR and the time off we had over Christmas we found that the interest level in wow and raiding had dropped almost completely. Whilst we were well on our way to completing our objective we decided to take the interests of our members as our number one priority and suspend raiding for a while.

A few months passed and we are at the beginning of March, It was at this point activity on our forums increased and we could see that perhaps we might be able to string something together even it was just casual normal modes just to pass the time to the next expansion, where we would get a more serious operation started again. Surprisingly we managed to maintain a fair portion of our raiding team with 9 returning. With some asking around of our friends to help we entered Dragon Soul with exactly 10 people on our raiding roster. It was at this point we realized how easy heroics had become with the 10% zone nerf. On our first raid within two and a half months we quickly cleaned up to Blackhorn easily. We decided to give him a few efforts after reading about it on the forums and on the second try he died (we accidentally let the boat blow up on the first try), we couldn’t believe it and were happy to be raiding again.

Two weeks after defeating Blackhorn and with the power of the nerfs the next bosses weren't really a problem, the nerfs had made everything a bit of a joke to be truthfully honest and we quickly wrapped up spine and madness without much of a problem, taking around 30 and 20 pulls respectively. Considering we had a two and a half month raid break we were quite happy with the realm fifth position that we ended in. Our aim for Mists of Pandaria was that we could aim to keep up with the world ranks of our earlier DS kills, in the rank range of 70-300, we know we had it in us in terms of our player skill we just had to have a consistent tier from beginning to end to pull it off.